


the space between

by windfalling



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 03:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5897302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windfalling/pseuds/windfalling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She knows she will never be able to escape her past. There are some things that cannot be left behind.</i>
</p><p>Liz learns how to move forward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the space between

**Author's Note:**

> this started out as fix-it fic for 3.11, then turned into more of me trying to work out what happened in canon, then 3.12 happened and… i don’t even know anymore. for the sake of my own mind, let’s just pretend that the pregnancy happened after she was exonerated, and that it’s been much more than a week between that and the parking lot/hospital scene. (like. maybe a month long lmao)
> 
> fair **warning** \-- while this ends with red  & liz, it is somewhat canon-compliant throughout 3.11 (but diverges after that), so tom is in this. please note that this is not a friendly portrayal of tom or tom/liz. most of the tom/liz content is in the first half, although it's largely introspective on liz's part. (eta: if you find that i _have_ romanticised tom/liz, let me know bc that means i've clearly screwed up)

 . 

 

 

Red drops her off at a hotel and slides a key card into her hand. Liz is halfway out of the car when she realizes: he isn’t coming with her.

She’s been exonerated. It is an end to all the running away, the hiding, the constant movement. But it is an end to _this_ , too—the two of them, on the run, surviving against all odds.

“I have a meeting to get to,” he says. “The room is yours, for as long as you need it.”

His voice is worn and weary, and she is tempted to ask him to stay with her, to come up, to get some rest. But whatever it is, it must be important, because he glances down at his watch, his gaze already moving away from her.

In the end, she just says, “Thank you, again. For everything.”

 

 

 

 

 

She had forgotten the loneliness of an empty room.

She spent those three months with Red in near-constant proximity. It is strange to not feel him nearby, to not be able to walk through a door and see him standing there, to not talk to him until she falls asleep.

There is no trace of him anywhere.

Then she sees it: a bouquet of flowers on the table next to a box of her favourite desserts.

 _Congratulations_ , is all the note says, but it is enough. She smiles.

 

 

 

 

 

Tom calls in the morning.

“I tried your phone last night, but I couldn’t reach you,” he says.

“I was sleeping,” she replies, her voice still sluggish and drowsy. “ _Am_ sleeping,” she corrects herself.

“Where are you?”

She almost tells him, has the name of the hotel on her tongue. Then her eyes snap open, some self-preservation instinct taking over in response to the tightening in her chest. “I’ll come find you. The boat still in the same place?”

 

 

 

 

 

She still remembers the look on Red’s face every time she brought up Tom. How he tensed, his mood darkening. How he would remind her of who Tom was, what he had done.

 _He has information, things that could help us_ , she would say, and Red would turn away, his expression shuttered.

When Tom calls her from their favourite Chinese restaurant, when Tom says things like _remember when_ , when Tom tells her he loves her—

She wants to run to him. She wants to run away.

 

 

 

 

 

In the end, she goes to him.

Tom is familiar, Tom is an escape. She’s spent years loving him; she does not know how to undo it. To not remember what it was like to be married to him, to wake up next to him, to love him. It is easy to fall back into memory, into fantasy. It is easy to pretend that they can go back to this semblance of normalcy.

She closes her eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

Liz wakes to the sound of her phone vibrating.

It takes a moment to orient herself. She isn’t in some basement or hotel room or borrowed apartment. She isn’t a fugitive anymore. And the person sleeping next to her on the bed—

is not Red.

They did not often share a bed while they were on the run, but when it was the only option left, they both learned quickly that it was easier to sleep next to each other than to argue about who gets the couch. It was awkward, at first. But it happened enough times that eventually, she never hesitated to slide into bed next to him. She stopped feeling embarrassed, too, when she woke up curled against his side.

She learned things about Red over the past three months, little habits that stuck in her memory. Like how, whenever he took off any piece of clothing, he had to fold it precisely and neatly, whereas she freely threw her clothing over a chair. How he couldn’t sleep facing away from the door—or how he couldn’t _sleep_ , period. She can’t count the number of times she’d woken up in the middle of the night to him pretending to sleep or simply lying there, awake. Sometimes he would be gone, and she would reach out to an empty bed.

But it is Tom next to her, now. Her ex-husband. Her ex-nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

She fumbles for her phone, finds it in the pocket of her discarded jeans. “Hello?”

“I came by the hotel earlier, but you weren’t there.” It’s Red, and she darts her eyes at Tom, her stomach twisting. 

It’s almost noon. “Yeah, I just—I’m out.” She winces.

There’s a pause, and he knows, he’s always known when she’s keeping something from him. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

Then Tom wakes and says her name, loud enough to be heard through the phone, and the following silence tears her apart.

“Red—”

But she doesn’t know what to say.

“If you need anything, you know how to find me,” he finally says, and his voice sounds different, now. Tired, a little more formal.

He hangs up.

 

 

 

 

 

Part of her knows that none of this is real.

There’s a disconnection in her mind between who Tom is, who he isn’t, who he pretends to be. She likes to keep herself firmly in the present, in moving on and starting over, but she keeps getting dragged back to the past, to remembering—

 _Call me Jacob_ , a reminder against her mouth.

 _Your husband never existed,_ a voice in her memory.

He touches her with fingers that she broke, hands that she bound.

Hands that pressed a gun to her head. Hands that wrote Meera’s death sentence. Hands that choked the life out of an innocent man while she struggled and watched. Hands that took her heart, hands that took years of her life from her and turned it into nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

She shoves him away, staggers to the bathroom.

Her reflection in the mirror seems distant, her body not her own. Her hands won’t stop shaking. She can’t look at herself.

She throws up.

 

 

 

 

 

She knows she will never be able to escape her past. There are some things that cannot be left behind.

 

 

 

 

 

The words tumble out of her: “He proposed.”

She hadn’t planned on telling him. She hadn’t planned on saying anything related to Tom at all.

Red isn’t facing her. He’s by the window, looking at some files he’s spread out under the sunlight. But after she speaks, his back goes rigid, and the paper he’s holding crinkles between his fingertips.

He’s only a few feet away, but there’s something different between them, now. It’s more than the uncertainty, the awkwardness of whatever their relationship has become on these new terms. There’s a divide between them in the shape of the person she had not wanted to mention.

He turns to her. “Lizzy,” he says, his voice snagging in the middle of her name, and she does not know what to make of it, the way he says it, that look on his face. Like she’s already gone.

“It’s not like I’m going to say yes,” she says quickly. “It’s not what I want right now.”

An echo from a dream, long, long ago: _What do you want, Agent Keen? What do you really want?_

He says, his voice tight, “If you marry Tom—”

Dembe comes in the room, then. There’s some urgent development with whatever Red’s planning next.

Liz leaves first.

 

 

 

 

 

_If you marry Tom—_

She never does hear the rest of the sentence. If she marries Tom—what?

The mystery of it gnaws at her for the rest of the day. One possibility lodges in her mind: if she marries Tom, he’ll leave.

She immediately shuts down that thought. She knows that he would not leave her—would _never_ leave her behind. It is a conviction that is lodged deep into her bones.

The choice has always been hers.

She has always been the one to decide whether or not to walk away.

 

 

 

 

 

Liz moves out of the hotel and into her new apartment.

She does not tell Tom.

 

 

 

 

 

Her calendar has never been wrong.

She begins counting days.

 

 

 

 

 

Then there is the man, the parking lot, the word _traitor_ flung at her, razor-sharp.

She wakes up at the hospital, pain stabbing into her chest, her legs, her face.

The doctor standing at the side of the bed, telling her—

 

 

 

 

 

Liz recognizes the hand that holds hers, even in sleep.

She opens her eyes. Red sits next to her bed, a newspaper in his other hand. He hasn’t noticed that she’s awake yet.

The last time she saw him, they had—not _fought_ , exactly. But they were on strange terms. Now, with the baby—

Her hand tightens around his. Red turns to look at her, setting the newspaper down next to his hat. “It’s early,” he says, and her eyes flick to the clock. Four in the morning. He smooths back her hair, his fingers so hesitant and gentle, afraid to hurt her. “Go back to sleep.”

It hasn’t fully sunken in yet. Saying it aloud, telling another person—it would only make it that much more real.

So she closes her eyes and lets herself dream, just for a little more.

 

 

 

 

 

She thinks of the Djinn, of her fantasy. Walking with her daughter in the park, in the light, unafraid.

She thinks of the man in the parking lot, of her face broadcasted across the country. She thinks of suffocating in the box, of her head pushed into water, of all the gunfights, of a hundred near-deaths. She thinks of Reddington, at the centre of it all.

_This fight isn’t over._

She’s been drifting, uncertain of where she stands, a foot in either world. Former FBI agent and convicted felon. But she made her choice when she threatened the Director with the fulcrum, when she pulled the trigger and shot Connolly.

She cannot undo it.

 

 

 

 

 

Liz wakes up.

 

 

 

 

 

After she gets discharged from the hospital, Red visits in the evening to help her get settled into her new apartment. Everything’s still packed up, boxes strewn everywhere. She hasn’t even had time to set up the bed yet; all she has is a mattress on the floor. Her fridge, too, is still empty.

She thought that he would have seemed out of place, Red in the middle of all her packed belongings. But she finds that she likes having him here, in her apartment, in her territory. It’s familiar, in a way.

Liz takes a seat on a stool by the counter. He is surveying the empty living room, saying something about how a couch would fit _perfectly_ in that particular spot, and she does not want to ruin it, this comfortable peace with him, but there will never be a good time to say it.

So she does.

 

 

 

 

 

After three months, she’s gotten better at reading him. She knows where to look and what to look for: a twitch in his cheek, the movement of his hands, his eyes.

Those two words lie between them and cannot be unsaid. Now, she waits for the aftermath.

For a moment, Red goes utterly still, his face frozen in shock. He swallows thickly, his fingers twitching at his side, his hands clenching and unclenching. “Tom,” he says, thinly-veiled disgust and contempt in one syllable, and it isn’t really a question, but she nods.

“I haven’t told him,” she says quietly. Not about the baby, and not about the apartment, either. At his boat, she can pretend. She can disappear. But having him here would blur the lines too much.

She touches her stomach, feels nausea slide up her throat. _Too late for that_ , she thinks.

His eyes follow the movement of her hand. It’s the most unsettled she’s ever seen him, his composure held together by the thinnest of threads. She can almost feel it, the edge he’s on.

There’s a bottle of wine on the countertop that Red had given as a present only a few days ago, to celebrate her getting the apartment. She’d been saving it for the housewarming, but now, with the baby, it’s wasted on her, anyway.

She opens one of the boxes and pulls out a glass. When she reaches for the wine, he seems to snap out of his daze, a faint look of disapproval on his face. “Lizzy, you shouldn’t—”

She gives him a look, and his mouth closes. “It’s not for me,” she says, pouring a generous amount. She hands the glass to him, and he takes it without a word.

“The Cabal,” he begins, then stops, reconsiders what he means to say.

She traces the dark borders of a bruise on her arm, presses her fingers down. “I know.” There is this war that will never end, a target on her back that will never be erased. She’s so tired of it all.

Liz thinks of Tom in the boat. Tom who is not Tom, who does not exist, who she does not know. _Sail away with me_.

Things are different now. She can’t keep pretending.

He places the empty glass on the counter, staring at her. Something in his face changes. She waits for him to tell her about how difficult it will be to raise a child if she keeps it. How much danger she’s in, how she can’t keep running away.

Instead, Red takes a seat on the stool next to her and reaches for her hand. He says, “What do you want to do?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

She wants to raise her child, she wants to be able to hold and kiss and raise them, she wants to see them grow up, she wants—

 

 

 

 

 

They discuss the options.

To terminate. To have the baby. To give it up for adoption. To keep it.

“You still have time,” Red tells her. “You don’t have to decide right now.”

She nods and stands, wincing at the pain in her chest. She takes shallow breaths as Red steadies her with a gentle hand at her back. That look in his eyes hasn’t disappeared, his brow still furrowed. She imagines that he’s already trying to plan ahead for what’s coming.

He goes to the window and checks the locks. He says, his back to her, “Will Tom be coming?” His voice is carefully controlled, but she hears the strain behind it.

Ten missed calls. So many decisions to make. But this one, this one she has to make now, she knows she does.

Liz stares at Red, at the rigid line of his shoulders. “No,” she says, hesitantly at first, then repeats it, louder and more certain. “No, he won’t.”

He turns to her and looks her in the eye, holds her gaze. Whatever he sees appears to calm him; some of his tension drains visibly in relief.

There is a tiny part of her that still reaches for Tom, the idea of it all, the fantasy. A part of her that thinks that maybe she could have it all. But this is where she needs to be now: here, in the present, in reality.

Red glances around the apartment and frowns, pulling out his phone. “I’m not comfortable leaving you here alone, Lizzy, after what happened.” 

“Who are you calling?”

“Just someone to keep watch.”

Liz thinks of the man he hired before, the sniper, the one who followed her to Tom all those months ago. “Is that really necessary?”

“The man who attacked you wasn’t even part of the Cabal,” he points out. “The whole nation knows your face. I think taking extra precautions is reasonable.”

“So, what, you’ll have guards posted outside my door all the time? That won’t be conspicuous at _all_ ,” she says, and the biting sarcasm is too soon for whatever fragile balance they’ve found, too soon for the edge they’re both on. He gives her a tired look.

“Okay, I’m sorry, I just—” she sighs, rubbing at her eyes. “It’s late. Can we figure out the whole security thing tomorrow? As for tonight, I don’t know. Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

He blinks, tilting his head. “Right now?”

“Yeah. I mean, if you’re free ‘til morning, you might as well stay.” She shuffles her feet, but she does not look away. “If you want.”

His face softens. The phone goes back in his pocket. “Alright,” he says, and stays.

 

 

 

 

 

Red volunteers to help her assemble the bed frame.

He sits on the floor, his suit jacket hanging in the coat closet, sleeves rolled to his elbows. Liz has a slice of pizza in one hand and the booklet of instructions in the other, reading them aloud to him.

“You just need to take that round thing and attach it to the other screw.”

He frowns down at the materials laid out around him. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that, Lizzy.”

She finds the piece and hands it over. “Here, see? It’ll attach to the—oh, wait. I think we skipped a step.”

She smiles at the look on his face. It’s a little strange to be doing something as simple as assembling an IKEA bed frame with him—stranger still to be spending so much time with him that isn’t about a case, or that doesn’t involve running and hiding for their lives.

There will always be the next person the blacklist, always someone to fight. Liz knows it can’t be like this forever, but she’s glad for this moment nonetheless.

There’s a look of intense concentration on his face as he works on the frame. As his hands spin the screwdriver, she suddenly recalls seeing him building that music box, all those days spent over a worktable, for her. A deep fondness anchors into her chest.

“I missed you.”

He looks up. Touches her cheek with tentative fingers. He says, “I missed you, too.”

 

 

 

 

 

By the time they’ve set up the bed frame and the mattress and the sheets, it’s well into the night, nearly early morning.

Liz goes into the bathroom to change. When she comes out, Red is sitting on the edge of the bed, hands clasped together. His shoes are off, but he’s still wearing his vest and tie. He merely looks at her, head angled, a question in his eyes.

She hadn’t even questioned it, that they would be sharing her bed. Now, though, she is suddenly self-conscious. Is it so different to sleep together out of choice rather than necessity?

 _Yes_ , her mind answers, heat climbing up her neck, _yes it is_. She struggles to find a way to tell him, _you can sleep with me_ , that has less of a double-meaning and won’t make things more awkward than it already is.

“You’re on my side of the bed,” she ends up saying.

It is enough. He begins unbuttoning his waistcoat, then pauses, and she realizes that she’s just been staring at him the whole time. He raises an eyebrow as he slides it off.

Liz flushes and goes to take it from him to hang it. His hand lingers on hers when she does, and she finds herself drawn toward him by some strange impulse, until she is standing between his legs, and she is the one still holding onto him, she is the one who does not want to let go.

She sets the vest next to him. His touch trails down her arm, her side, settles at her waist. His other hand has paused at his tie; she begins to undo it herself.

An awareness pushes at her skin. Red has touched her before, has held her and kissed her head, but there is something different about this, the way he’s looking up at her, the way it feels, something—

His fingers brush against her stomach. Still flat, not yet showing.

—she isn’t ready for. Not now. 

Her body goes tense, and his hand drops. She reaches for the abandoned vest and backs away quickly. “I’ll go hang this up in the closet.”

 

 

 

 

 

Red breathes slowly and evenly next to her, but she knows he’s still awake. He’s turned in her direction, facing the door. He had not said anything else to her other than a _good night, Lizzy_ , after what happened, and there is a respectable space between them that he has not crossed.

That familiar awkwardness starts to creep in again, but instead of letting it unnerve her, she shuffles nearer to him, lets her knee nudge gently against his.

She finds his face in the dark, her vision still adjusting. Her eyes trace his brow, the bridge of his nose, the curve of his mouth. When her gaze drifts back up, she finds him looking back at her, watching her watching him.

She thinks of saying, _if I asked you to take me away, me and the baby, would you?_

She wonders how he would react, or if he would.

But she’s getting better at figuring out what she wants. So instead, she says, “I’m not going to run away anymore.”

She says it for herself. But she thinks it’s what he needed to hear, too; the last of the tension leaves his body, the lines of his face smoothing out.

He reaches for her, and she immediately curls into his side, her head pillowed on his chest and tucked underneath his chin. He strokes her hair and presses his lips to her forehead.

For now, they sleep.

 

 

.


End file.
